GEORGIAN BAY
In a lovely piece in the Walrus, “The Map Maker”, the writer, David MacFarlane, quotes Canadian painter, John Hartman, who lives and paints on the Bay: “I believe we all have a home landscape, a place from our childhood, whose light, space and scale are the benchmark for all other landscapes. We all carry our home landscapes around inside us.” The eastern shore of Georgian Bay is my home landscape.
I spent the summers of my childhood at an idyllic, rustic resort between Snug Harbour and Parry Sound called Jacknife Lodge. In my twenties I returned to the Bay, paddling out to crown islands with friends on Friday evenings to camp and watch the Perseids. I have spent the last forty odd summers exploring the islands and shoals of that coast – a place where, when faced with the troubles of modern life, I have often sought the solitude and spiritual renewal that Wendell Berry so beautifully and sparingly conveys in his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things“.
Wendell Berry’s poetry is, of course, part of a long and well-trodden romantic tradition that emphasizes both a deep affection for place and nature’s gift for quieting the mind, bringing worldly concerns into perspective, and evoking feelings of connection with nature – a perspective we all, perhaps, could do with more of.
It is in this spirit that I offer these photographs of the Bay.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.